Free and Open Source Software

This thought came to me in the shower today. Open source checks most of the boxes. It is a collaborative, worker owned (develloper-owned) project, that tries to flatten hierarchy. Especially if you look at something like Debian ), which really tries to have a bottom-up structure.
Of course, there are exceptions, considering there are a lot of corporate open-source projects, that are not democratically maintained and clearly only serve the interest of the company, who created it (like chromium for example).
So I am mainly talking about community-oriented FOSS projects here.
And if you were to agree with my statement, would you say that developing FOSS software is advancing the goals of the anarchist / communist project, because it is laying the groundwork infrastructure needed for a new kind of economy and society?
Thought this could be an interesting discussion!

I've been looking around and while there are some Foss apps for public transit, I haven't found one that works in Sydney. I was wondering if anyone knew a good one.

Built a set of free crypto tools:

• Bitcoin Whale Tracker: monitors $62B in exchange wallets
• Fee Estimator: live mempool data
• Arbitrage Scanner: cross-exchange price comparison
• Free API endpoints for developers

No signup, no tracking, no ads. All running on a single VPS.

Feedback welcome!

Over the past few months, our former payment provider Nexi S.p.A. (“Nexi”) requested access to private data, which we understood to be specifically the usernames and passwords of our supporters. We have refused this request. All our attempts to clarify Nexi’s request, or to understand how their need for such information was necessary and legal, were met with what we consider to be vague and unsatisfactory explanations relating to a general need for risk analysis.

Subsequently, we found ourselves unable to receive credit card donations through Nexi’s system. In the afternoon of 10 March, we were further informed that our contract had been cancelled a few days prior on 7 March, due to our supposed failure to meet their deadline to fulfil their request. This deadline was not communicated to us beforehand, despite us having been Nexi’s customer for the past 15 years.

This is completely crazy! As 450 supporters are affected, that is a huge amount of donations that were cut off!

I am a committee member in an infosec-focused student society, and I am going to be doing a talk next Wednesday. This is to be called "Brave GNU World" and (as the name suggests) it's about FOSS and the free software movement.

We've had some fairly dry talks and some quite fantastic ones over the years, and I want this to be the latter (my previous attempts have been successful), so I plan to focus on some of the more entertaining details; but I will get the whole picture across in any case.

So, does anyone have any suggestions or ideas?

cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/fediverse/p/1233752/any-mediawiki-experts-looking-for-help-contributors-in-establishing-our-new-community

Preface: I know MediaWiki isn't part of the Fediverse, but the community is intended to be two parts (MediaWiki/nodeBB forums) and the forums will be federated. I could not find any active communities within the fediverse related to MediaWiki or wikis in general, so I figured this community might suffice, since ultimately this community as a whole will be federated through the forum.

Hello everyone, I have started on the journey to set up a community that focuses on open-licensed projects (open source/creative commons) where members can collaborate and network to help get their projects while contributing to a library of openly licensed projects.

The community is two parts: a MediaWiki & a nodeBB forum.
The idea is to have the wiki act as a hub to build/document open source projects, where individuals can contribute and help each other out in small ways, without necessarily needing to commit to a long term project - the community can work together to make small contributions to many projects to help the collective, rather then requiring individuals to formally commit to one or two projects long term. The forum is there to help people more easily communicate and network, and compliment the wiki as a collaboration platform/community building.

This project quickly got over my head, as it started out as an idea to create a forum to try and build a community for building up my open source projects. But the idea expanded and is now evolving to it's current state. I am figuring things out as I go, and have managed to get things mostly ready, but I have largely relied on LLMs and forums to get me this far. I am not experienced in wiki's or moderating a forum. I have found 2 other people who were interested in the project, so there are currently 3 of us that have been working to get this community platform up and running - but none of us are experienced in administrating MediaWiki or its settings.

The request:
I am hoping to find at least one "MediaWiki power-user" who can ensure we are following best practices, not opening ourselves up to vulnerabilities, etc. If someone who is potentially passionate in what we are trying to create, we would love to add another member (or a few) to our team to help ensure we are prepared to launch the community successfully.

In addition to setting up the community, it would obviously be nice you would also be interested in helping us moderate and maintain our community as we evolve.

I don't have any expectations for commitments, as this is simply a hobby project - whatever & whenever you can help.

Note: this endeavor is purely a hobby project, and I am just one person who is trying to find a few others who want to help contribute - this is by no means a business or intended as a source of revenue.

The wiki has registration closed at the moment, since we are still setting things up (be advised, some of the content may be broken or placeholder text), but if you want to check out more about our project to see if its something you are interested in: https://unfinishedprojects.net/

I hope someone might be interested :) . . . and if not, I am always open to simple feedback or suggestions if you have any, but don't have the time to actually help with the project.

If you are interested, please don't hesitate to reach out, and I'd be happy to discuss it further and details about joining the team. I obviously want to be careful about who I hand out permissions to, but overall, I believe that the more people and experience we have, the better; as long as you're a team player and want what is best for the project :D

TrueNAS deprecates its public build repository on GitHub, raising questions in the community about openness and release transparency.

Seems like TrueNAS has taken the first step away from being Open-Source

The last maintenance release of the 25.12 series is out with the usual batch of stability fixes and workflow improvements. Highlights include small interface refinements such as better dock widget behavior, improved shortcut handling in fullscreen mode, logically grouped marker menu items, and a new option to disable timeline effects in the hamburger menu. The release also brings improvements to multistream clip handling and ripple editing, as well as fixing small memleak in the render widget and a crash in the curve editor. See the changelog below for more details.

Readme updated today:

This repository is no longer actively maintained.

The TrueNAS build system previously hosted here has been moved to an internal infrastructure. This transition was necessary to meet new security requirements, including support for Secure Boot and related platform integrity features that require tighter control over the build and signing pipeline.

No further updates, pull requests, or issues will be accepted. Existing content is preserved here for historical reference only.

https://github.com/truenas/scale-build

Wondering if this is just the first step towards doing a minio in the future.

see also https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_source_together_with_this_one_simple_trick/

2026-03-02 by GIMP Team

We’re excited to release the third release candidate of GIMP version 3.2! It contains a number of bug fixes and final polishes as we prepare the first stable release of GIMP 3.2.

Release Highlights
New Splash Screen
Non-Raster Layers
Color Operations
UX / UI Improvements
File Formats

   DDS
   JPEG2000
   OpenEXR
   Procreate Swatches
   Swatchbooker Palettes
   XMC
   WebP

Bug Fixes and Improvements
Fancier .dmg and Windows installer; and sturdier .appimage
API
Security
Around GIMP

   Website
   Translations
   Google Summer of code

Release Stats
Downloading GIMP 3.2 RC3
What’s next

What’s next

We nearly thought that the RC2 would be the last release candidate, but it turned out we found more things we were not really happy with, for a stable version. And the more we fixed, the more it became clear that a RC3 was needed.

We are now in a state where we feel happy again. Of course, there are some things we would like to spend more time on, but we have to stop somewhere. Hopefully you will think the same! So as usual, we are calling for everyone to massively test this version 3.2.0 RC3. Please everyone, test and report any issue you find!

Depending on the testing feedback, we may get GIMP 3.2.0 out very soon!

Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger!

https://infosec.exchange/@geeknik/116163286092537518

https://9to5linux.com/gnu-octave-11-open-source-scientific-programming-language-officially-released

Hi, I'm currently enrolled in a CS course that requires me to build tests for one project. The professor incentivizes us to find FOSS projects in languages we understand, so the project goes more smoothly.

Is anyone aware of any medium sized python/java Foss projects in need of testing?

If you can't recall any with those requisites, send any other my way anyway. Thank you!

cross-posted from: https://thelemmy.club/post/45175848

Just got pleasantly surprised by the 3.7 release!!

Thx devs & contributors for keeping the project alive!

/HeliBoard/releases

Changes since 3.7-beta1:

- fix issues with selection wrapping
- add info to timestamp setting on how to get the button
- additional info dialogs about gesture data gathering

Changes since 3.6:

- add ("normal" / non-inline) emoji search, by @eranl (#1765)
-- needs emoji dictionary from dictionaries repository
- add optional gesture data gathering functionality (#1641)
-- requires gesture typing library, see #2226 for info
- wrap selected text in braces and similar instead of replacing text (#1948)
- better detection of which emojis are available
- allow setting a separate emoji font (#1565)
- make showing number row in symbols layout optional
- reduce bad autocorrections for mail addresses
- fix space bar cursor movement for RTL + non-RTL text, by @eranl (#2199)
- don't trim selection when recapitalizing, by @devycarol (#2225)
- improve khipro combiner, by @qomarhsn (#2134, #2239)
- update Kaitag layout, by @alkaitagi (#2306) minor fixes and improvements

TL;DR: Mozilla recently released AI controls for Firefox: a single control panel that lets people disable AI features in the browser or pick and choose which to leave on. On the surface, this sounds like a win for user choice in an era of AI-everything.

If we dig deeper, you can start to see that the kill switch isn’t the whole story. This feature acts like an accountability sink. By giving you an off-switch, Mozilla’s leadership shifts the ethical burden of AI onto the user - turning their design choices into your responsibility.

Good $TIME_OF_DAY, beehaw folks!

Today I come to share the first announcement of Konform Browser 140.8.0-103 and what's new since previous update post last week!

If you are new to Konform Browser, it was previously introduced to the lemmies in this post. In one sentence, it's a web browser for Linux based on Firefox ESR with the primary goals of security, privacy, and user freedom. Hoping to be an example of how these three goals don't have to be at odds but support each other and work in harmony.

Without more ado, some highlights of the new since last week:

• Exposed UI for "Local AI" features like full-page translations, link previews and configuring local models. These features are all disabled by default but now easier to selectively enable and keeps working locally and offline more gracefully when remote updates are disabled.
  • This coincides funnily with the new "AI killswitch" news from FF v148 this week. Konform Browser approaches the "AI/ML" feature-set from the opposite end from upstream: Selective opt-in, progressive enhancement, and graceful degradation, while making sure any external endpoints or keys are user-configurable.
  • Check out about:translations (which is pretty handy and reliable) and about:inference (where you can now load and test arbitrary models from HuggingFace)!
  • The "Link Preview" feature is rather janky and considered experimental.
  • The "AI chatbot" integration to bigcloudtech is unaffected by these changes and remains disabled under every preset.
• Latest security fixes up to Mozilla Firefox ESR 140.8.0.
• Various privacy improvements
  • navigator.sendBeacon() now disabled by default (re-enabled by "Just Make It Work" preset)
  • Ported over several relevant patches from Tor Browser
  • Proxy bypass protection enabled to reduce risk of network leaks
• Changes made on about:welcome now take effect immediately without requiring browser restart
• UI: Disabled various nags and onboarding callouts (no more "Hey please try the new feature" in the middle of your workflow)

For more details check out release notes and (if that's not detailed enough for you :p) commit log.

If you check it out, would love your feedback on the project in general and, if this isn't a first, your take on development and recent updates. Fellow devs: Doors wide-open for new (carbon-based) contributors ^^

Konform Browser is now also on Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@konform

Packages available for most Linux distributions.

AUR source package

Releases

I am exploring some foss apps which provide me the latest updated content of streaming services like amazon prime, jio hotstar, sony liv, netflix etc

Because I am tired to pay premium or explore it on telegram group because they are very shady and uts search bar is disgusting

now.

I'm not sure if what I'm looking for exists, or if it's even possible to build.

I would like to have a central place where I can donate some monthly amount. I set up my profile and say, from my monthly donation, I want x percent to go to this project, y percent to that project, and so on. So instead of setting up some number of donations for all the projects I use and want to support, I have a single donation to support multiple projects.

Is there already a platform like this?

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/42165288

Free beer is great. Securing the keg costs money fosdem 2026  Open source registries are in financial peril, a co-founder of an open source security foundation warned after inspecting their books. And it's not just the bandwidth costs that are killing them.…

cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/machinelearning/p/1092955/looking-for-ml-coders-for-help-with-open-source-creative-commons-board-game-ai-player-logi

I know this is probably a long shot, but I'm not sure where else to ask so I'm going to take a shot.

I've designed and abstract board game (think chess, shogi, go, etc) and have completed coding the rules for play against an AI player, however getting the actual AI to be good is a whole other problem.

I would love if someone who is experienced in ML would be interested in collaborating on this open source project.

The game is strictly a hobby project, with absolutely no plans for monitization or anything. Currently it's playable in the browser against AI (no multiplayer yet set up) at: https://greenants.github.io/Amalgam_Webgame/

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/GreenAnts/Amalgam_Webgame

Disclaimer: I've mostly used AI to code this project, as I'm a pretty novice programmer. Obviously that's controversial, so I want to make that clear - but remember this is simply a hobby project, and is a way for me to get my board game design digitized and actually played by others. The code will likely be a bit on the messy side, but I think for the most part the ML coder would only be interacting with the controller - so shouldn't be too much of a factor.

From my limited understanding, the actual search depth and complexity of the game is quite high, far higher than chess, so it's been quite hard for me to try and get this set up even with the help of AI coding with hueristics.

If you are interested in in the project at all, I'm always looking for help to farther this project - as I've been working on the board game itself (on and off) for more than 10 years.

The GitHub Repo listed above (in the README.md) has a graphical rulebook as well as a video tutorial linked for you to learn the rules and get an idea of the game complexity if you are interested.

Like I said, I know this is a long shot, and unlikely anyone will be interested, but I figured I'd give it a shot :)

That's a loss — not because maintainers of free software owe anyone commitments, but because the unstated status quo presumes this support. Maintainers will consciously understand that no such obligation exists, but still feel a presure to provide indefinite and unsustainable support. And that dynamic contributes to an extractive open source ecosystem.

Author's original Mastodon post - https://fosstodon.org/@donmccurdy/110662029314944366